Month: March 2008

Last week, through a series of events, an iPhone ended up on my desk. I was not planning on getting one, since I really liked my HTC s710 . But if I hated the new phone, I could allways sell it on ebay and make a profit.

The phone has a very nice design, everything just looks good. The box it comes in, the housing, the screen,… it just breathes quality. Now I’m not going to write an in detail review about it, but the most important improvement, if I compare it to my previous phone, is the web surfing. No longer is the layout of any site screwed up, you can zoom in and out on any site. Turn the phone on its side and you get a panoramic view, it’s just amazing, boom! This is significantly better than on the htc, but webmasters should still think about the footprint of their site on smartphones. I read the news on the mobile version of tweakers and while I could use their normal version, I still prefer the lighter one. It loads faster, has less graphical content,… just because the iPhone can display a full web page in all its glory doesn’t mean you can forget people are using other devices to visit your site.

The Youtube integration is a cool feature as well. I was able to get youtube content on my htc with vTap, but no way near the sound and video quality I now have.

Sending mail, nothing special here. Except ofcourse the touchscreen enables the nice scrolling feature which you have in all iPhone applications. There is integration with for instance, google mail, and you get imap integration if supported by the mail provider. But I just stick to the regular pop3.

Music playback, the iPhone is an iPod so you get all of the features they have and more. Most notably is the coverflow which is a visual representation of your music albums. So instead of moving through the folders on the disk you get more of a real life experience of going through your cd collection.

There is plenty more I could talk about but you’ll be able to find all of it on the internet, a good place to start is the Apple site. So what’s my advice on this new toy? Great device, it has a nice user interface, is more stable than my Windows Mobile device, doesn’t hang as much as the htc but it isn’t perfect. There are improvements that should be taken care of, for instance the keyboard doesn’t follow the rotation of your iPhone in all applications. Also I don’t think the device is for everyone, while I enjoy having my mails with me all the time and have the capability to go online everywhere anytime, I’m not Mr. everyday consumer. Most people will settle for a simple cell phone and MP3 player which you can both get for 1/4th of the price. But hey, don’t listen to me, you won’t regret having the device and the Apple marketing machine will probably do it’s best to convince you it’s the next best thing ;).

Below is a side by side comparison for the size.From left to right: a Nokia 5510, a HTC s710, an iPhone. There’s a screen protector with some air between it and the screen on the htc and some fingerprints on the iPhone 🙂 All can be removed easily.

For some reason, if you’ve studied informatics, people tend to believe you can fix their computers. I really don’t like cleaning up the mess other people create, since most of the time it’s a trivial task.Just read the error message or go to the all mighty google and you’ll be able to fix most problems.

However the latest problem I encountered was more of a challenge. After formatting the hard disk and installing a fresh copy of Windows XP I let it update itself, leading from one error to the next. So I turned off automatic updates, went to the update site myself, selected all the available updates, crash… Although some updates were installed successful some kept on crashing the windows update process. After trying several things the solution that worked in the end was to create two folders ( c:temp and c:wutemp) and clear all the contents of the folder SoftwareDistribution which is under the root directory of where you installed Windows. Note that for this last step you need to turn off the running Automatic Update service. To do this go to control panel, select computer management, select services, then select automatic updates and press the stop button. After you’ve deleted the contents of the SoftwareDistribution folder you can turn this service on again.

So, no more Windows Update crashes, hurrah! The update process continued now peacefully, and the list kept getting smaller until there were 4 updates remaining. These last kept returning in the list of essential updates, even though every time I installed them it was reported as a successful update. I resolved this by turning on automatic updates again (which I wanted to do when no more updates where available),now Windows installed them when I turned off the system. Powered the machine back on, went to the windows update site and saw that there were no more essential updates. Victory!

So let’s get this thing on the road! First post on my blogish kinda site. You’ll find some random thoughts and experiences from me on here, most of the time computer related though. But for now, an apple with a problem. It seems to like cutting itself.